Deborah Appleman

Triggers, Cancel Culture, and the Teacher's Dilemma

Literature and the New Culture Wars

Can educators continue to teach troubling but worthwhile texts? Our current “culture wars” have reshaped the politics of secondary literature instruction. Due to a variety of challenges from both the left and the right—to language or subject matter, to potentially triggering content, or to authors who have been canceled—school reading lists are rapidly shrinking. For many teachers, choosing which books to include in their curriculum has become an agonizing task with political, professional, and ethical dimensions. In Literature and the New Culture Wars, Deborah Appleman calls for a reacknowledgment of the intellectual and affective work that literature can do, and offers ways to continue to teach troubling texts without doing harm. Rather than banishing challenged texts from our classrooms, she writes, we should be confronting and teaching the controversies they invoke. Her book is a timely and eloquent argument for a reasoned approach to determining what literature still deserves to be read and taught and discussed.

Literature and the New Culture Wars: Triggers, Cancel Culture, and the Teacher's Dilemma

Offers strategies to guide students' review of literature; discusses the pros and cons of feminist, Marxist, deconstruction, and postmodern theories; and includes examples from a variety of literature types.

Teaching Literary Theory to Adolescents

Critical Encounters in High School English

Jeffrey D. Wilhelm

Michael W. Smith

Leave instruction to the experts! Uncommon Core puts us on high-alert about some outright dangerous misunderstandings looming around so-called “standards-aligned” instruction, then shows us how to steer past them—all in service of meeting the real intent of the Common Core. It counters with teaching suggestions that are true to the research and true to our students, including how: Reader-based approaches can complement text-based ones Prereading activities can help students meet the strategic and conceptual demands of texts Strategy instruction can result in a careful and critical analysis of text while providing transferable understandings Inquiry units around essential questions can generate meaningful conversation and higher-order thinking

Where the Authors of the Standards Go Wrong About Instruction-and How You Can Get It Right

Uncommon Core

Because of the emphasis placed on nonfiction and informational texts by the Common Core State Standards, literature teachers all over the country are re-evaluating their curriculum and looking for thoughtful ways to incorporate nonfiction into their courses. They are also rethinking their pedagogy as they consider ways to approach texts that are outside the usual fare of secondary literature classrooms. The Third Edition of Critical Encounters in Secondary English provides an integrated approach to incorporating nonfiction and informational texts into the literature classroom. Grounded in solid theory with new field-tested classroom activities, this new edition shows teachers how to adapt practices that have always defined good pedagogy to the new generation of standards for literature instruction. New for the Third Edition: A new preface and new introduction that discusses the CCSS and their implications for literature instruction. Lists of nonfiction texts at the end of each chapter related to the critical lens described in that chapter. A new chapter on new historicism, a critical lens uniquely suited to interpreting nonfiction and informational sources. New classroom activities created and field-tested specifically for use with nonfiction texts. Additional activities that demonstrate how informational texts can be used in conjunction with traditional literary texts. “What a smart and useful book!” —Mike Rose, University of California, Los Angeles “[This book] has enriched my understanding both of teaching literature and of how I read. I know of no other book quite like it.” —Michael W. Smith, Temple University, College of Education “I have recommended Critical Encounters to every group of preservice and practicing teachers that I have taught or worked with and I will continue to do so.” —Ernest Morrell, director of the Institute for Urban and Minority Education (IUME), Teachers College, Columbia University

Teaching Literary Theory to Adolescents, Third Edition

Critical Encounters in Secondary English

Richard Beach

Bob Fecho

Rob Simon

This popular textbook introduces prospective and practicing English teachers to current methods of teaching literature in middle and high school classrooms. It underscores the value of providing students with a range of different critical approaches and tools for interpreting texts and the need to organize literature instruction around topics and issues of interest to them. Throughout the textbook, readers are encouraged to raise and explore inquiry-based questions in response to authentic dilemmas and issues they face in the critical literature classroom. New in this edition, the text shows how these approaches to fostering responses to literature also work as rich tools to address the Common Core English Language Arts Standards. Each chapter is organized around specific questions that English educators often hear in working with pre-service teachers. Suggested pedagogical methods are modelled by inviting readers to interact with the book through critical-inquiry methods for responding to texts. Readers are engaged in considering authentic dilemmas and issues facing literature teachers through inquiry-based responses to authentic case narratives. A Companion Website [http://teachingliterature.pbworks.com] provides resources and enrichment activities, inviting teachers to consider important issues in the context of their current or future classrooms.

Teaching Literature to Adolescents

Peter Williamson

This important volume examines how and why increasing numbers of students, disproportionately youth of color, are being taken from our schools and put into our prisons. Williamson and Appleman, along with a collection of scholars, teacher educators, K–12 teachers, administrators, and incarcerated students, offer their perspectives on how schooling can be restructured to disrupt this flow and dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline. They present clearly articulated strategies on curriculum, pedagogy, and disciplinary practices that can help redirect our collective efforts away from carceral practices. By considering chapters from prison educators and currently incarcerated students (the end of the pipeline), readers will plainly see the disciplinary and curricular issues that need to be addressed in our schools. The text includes examples of meaningful ways to engage students that could be incorporated into a variety of classrooms, from social studies to science to English language arts. Book Features: Instructive cautionary tales with specific pedagogical and policy suggestions. Alternatives to discipline in schools, such as restorative justice and positive behavioral support.Insights to help educators consider the trajectory of their students, as well as suggestions for making the curriculum both relevant and sustaining. Directly addresses the ways in which an understanding of the mechanisms of the school-to-prison pipeline can be woven into teacher preparation.

How Educators Can Disrupt School Pushout and Mass Incarceration

School, Not Jail

Jeffrey Wilhelm

Susan Hynds

This text for pre-service and in-service English education courses presents current methods of teaching literature to middle and high school students. The methods are based on social-constructivist/socio-cultural theories of literacy learning, and incorporate research on literary response conducted by the authors. Teaching Literature to Adolescents – a totally new text that draws on ideas from the best selling textbook, Teaching Literature in the Secondary School, by Beach and Marshall – reflects and builds on recent key developments in theory and practice in the field, including: the importance of providing students with a range of critical lenses for analyzing texts and interrogating the beliefs, attitudes, and ideological perspectives encountered in literature; organization of the literature curriculum around topics, themes, or issues; infusion of multicultural literature and emphasis on how writers portray race, class, and gender differences; use of drama as a tool for enhancing understanding of texts; employment of a range of different ways to write about literature; integration of critical analysis of film and media texts with the study of literature; blending of quality young adult literature into the curriculum; and attention to students who have difficulty succeeding in literature classes due to reading difficulties, disparities between school and home cultures, attitudes toward school/English, or lack of engagement with assigned texts or response activities. The interactive Web site contains recommended readings, resources, and activities; links to Web sites and PowerPoint presentations; and opportunities for readers to contribute teaching units to the Web site databases. Instructors and students in middle and high school English methods courses will appreciate the clear, engaging, useful integration of theory, methods, and pedagogical features offered in this text.

Designed to introduce prospective English teachers to current methods of teaching literature in middle and high school classrooms, this popular textbook explores a variety of innovative approaches that incorporate reading, writing, drama, talk, and media production. Each chapter is organized around specific questions that English educators often hear in working with preservice teachers. The text engages readers in considering the dilemmas and issues facing literature teachers through inquiry-based responses to authentic case narratives. A Companion Website, http://teachingliterature.pbworks.com, provides resources and enrichment activities, inviting teachers to consider important issues in the context of their own current or future classrooms. New in the second edition: more attention to the use of digital texts from use of online literature to digital storytelling to uses of online discussion and writing tools incorporated throughout new chapter on teaching young adult literature new chapter on teaching reading strategies essential to interpreting literature more references to examples of teaching multicultural literature.

Deborah Appleman

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